Clark Duke

Clark Duke was only 7 when he landed his first acting gig as on "Hearts Afire" (CBS, 1992-95), but he avoided the dreaded child actor syndrome by staying out of the business until he was a young adult...
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Quincy Jones pays tribute to mentor Clark Terry

By:
WENN.com
Feb 22, 2015

Quincy Jones has paid tribute to his mentor Clark Terry following the jazz trumpeter's death on Saturday (21Feb15). The veteran musician, who had been battling advanced diabetes in recent years, passed away less than two weeks after he was admitted to a hospice as his health declined.
Jones honoured his friend in a statement which reads, "The world has lost one of the greatest trumpeters to ever grace the planet. Clark Terry was my first trumpet teacher as a teen in Seattle, my idol and my brother.
"When he left the (Count) Basie and (Duke) Ellington bands, also two of my idols, to join mine, it was one of the most humbling moments in my life. I hope the world will remember and celebrate the enormous contributions that Clark has made to America's musical lexicon. I will miss my mentor and friend terribly."
Acclaimed producer Jones was only 13 when he began studying under Terry, and they continued their collaborative relationship throughout their lengthy careers.
Jones also produced 2014 documentary Keep On Keepin' On, a film following Terry's work with 23-year-old blind piano prodigy Justin Kauflin.

Jazz great Clark Terry has died, aged 94. The veteran musician, who had been battling advanced diabetes in recent years, passed away less than two weeks after he was admitted to a hospice as his health declined.
His wife, Gwen Terry, shared the sad news in a post on Facebook on Saturday night (21Feb15), writing, "Our beloved Clark Terry has joined the big band in heaven where he'll be singing and playing with the angels. He left us peacefully, surrounded by his family, students and friends... We will miss him every minute of every day, but he will live on through the beautiful music and positivity that he gave to the world."
The flugelhorn and trumpet player rose to fame playing with Count Basie from 1948 to 1951 and he became Duke Ellington's sidekick throughout the 1950s. He later became the first African-American staff musician at TV network NBC, where he spent 12 years in The Tonight Show band.
Terry released more than 80 albums throughout his career and performed with stars including Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Charles Mingus, Aretha Franklin, Clifford Brown, Milt Jackson and Quincy Jones.
He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award in 2010 and published his autobiography a year later, in 2011. He was the subject of an acclaimed 2014 documentary, Keep on Keepin' On, which showed Clark mentoring 23-year-old blind piano prodigy Justin Kauflin.

Jazz great Clark Terry has entered a hospice after battling advanced diabetes for several years. The news of the revered trumpeter and flugelhorn player's health battle was revealed in a post on his website on Friday (13Feb15).
The message reads: "It is with a heavy heart we share that our beloved Clark Terry is now in hospice care. (His wife) Gwen and the healthcare team are making sure that Clark is as comfortable as possible. During this time the family is asking for your prayers."
The 94-year-old former sideman for Count Basie and Duke Ellington became the first African-American staff musician at TV network NBC, where he spent 12 years in The Tonight Show band.

DreamWorks
For the bulk of every Rocky and Bullwinkle episode, moose and squirrel would engage in high concept escapades that satirized geopolitics, contemporary cinema, and the very fabrics of the human condition. With all of that to work with, there's no excuse for why the pair and their Soviet nemeses haven't gotten a decent movie adaptation. But the ingenious Mr. Peabody and his faithful boy Sherman are another story, intercut between Rocky and Bullwinkle segments to teach kids brief history lessons and toss in a nearly lethal dose of puns. Their stories and relationship were much simpler, which means that bringing their shtick to the big screen would entail a lot more invention — always risky when you're dealing with precious material.
For the most part, Mr. Peabody &amp; Sherman handles the regeneration of its heroes aptly, allowing for emotionally substance in their unique father-son relationship and all the difficulties inherent therein. The story is no subtle metaphor for the difficulties surrounding gay adoption, with society decreeing that a dog, no matter how hyper-intelligent, cannot be a suitable father. The central plot has Peabody hosting a party for a disapproving child services agent and the parents of a young girl with whom 7-year-old Sherman had a schoolyard spat, all in order to prove himself a suitable dad. Of course, the WABAC comes into play when the tots take it for a spin, forcing Peabody to rush to their rescue.
Getting down to personals, we also see the left brain-heavy Peabody struggle with being father Sherman deserves. The bulk of the emotional marks are hit as we learn just how much Peabody cares for Sherman, and just how hard it has been to accept that his only family is growing up and changing.
DreamWorks
But more successful than the new is the film's handling of the old — the material that Peabody and Sherman purists will adore. They travel back in time via the WABAC Machine to Ancient Egypt, the Renaissance, and the Trojan War, and 18th Century France, explaining the cultural backdrop and historical significance of the settings and characters they happen upon, all with that irreverent (but no longer racist) flare that the old cartoons enjoyed. And oh... the puns.
Mr. Peabody &amp; Sherman is a f**king treasure trove of some of the most amazingly bad puns in recent cinema. This effort alone will leave you in awe.
The film does unravel in its final act, bringing the science-fiction of time travel a little too close to the forefront and dropping the ball on a good deal of its emotional groundwork. What seemed to be substantial building blocks do not pay off in the way we might, as scholars of animated family cinema, have anticipated, leaving the movie with an unfinished feeling.
But all in all, it's a bright, compassionate, reasonably educational, and occasionally funny if not altogether worthy tribute to an old favorite. And since we don't have our own WABAC machine to return to a time of regularly scheduled Peabody and Sherman cartoons, this will do okay for now.
If nothing else, it's worth your time for the puns.
3/5
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Lions Gate via Everett Collection
When we last left our heroes, they had conquered all opponents in the 74th Annual Hunger Games, returned home to their newly refurbished living quarters in District 12, and fallen haplessly to the cannibalism of PTSD. And now we're back! Hitching our wagons once again to laconic Katniss Everdeen and her sweet-natured, just-for-the-camera boyfriend Peeta Mellark as they gear up for a second go at the Capitol's killing fields.
But hold your horses — there's a good hour and a half before we step back into the arena. However, the time spent with Katniss and Peeta before the announcement that they'll be competing again for the ceremonial Quarter Quell does not drag. In fact, it's got some of the film franchise's most interesting commentary about celebrity, reality television, and the media so far, well outweighing the merit of The Hunger Games' satire on the subject matter by having Katniss struggle with her responsibilities as Panem's idol. Does she abide by the command of status quo, delighting in the public's applause for her and keeping them complacently saturated with her smiles and curtsies? Or does Katniss hold three fingers high in opposition to the machine into which she has been thrown? It's a quarrel that the real Jennifer Lawrence would handle with a castigation of the media and a joke about sandwiches, or something... but her stakes are, admittedly, much lower. Harvey Weinstein isn't threatening to kill her secret boyfriend.
Through this chapter, Katniss also grapples with a more personal warfare: her devotion to Gale (despite her inability to commit to the idea of love) and her family, her complicated, moralistic affection for Peeta, her remorse over losing Rue, and her agonizing desire to flee the eye of the public and the Capitol. Oftentimes, Katniss' depression and guilty conscience transcends the bounds of sappy. Her soap opera scenes with a soot-covered Gale really push the limits, saved if only by the undeniable grace and charisma of star Lawrence at every step along the way of this film. So it's sappy, but never too sappy.
In fact, Catching Fire is a masterpiece of pushing limits as far as they'll extend before the point of diminishing returns. Director Francis Lawrence maintains an ambiance that lends to emotional investment but never imposes too much realism as to drip into territories of grit. All of Catching Fire lives in a dreamlike state, a stark contrast to Hunger Games' guttural, grimacing quality that robbed it of the life force Suzanne Collins pumped into her first novel.
Once we get to the thunderdome, our engines are effectively revved for the "fun part." Katniss, Peeta, and their array of allies and enemies traverse a nightmare course that seems perfectly suited for a videogame spin-off. At this point, we've spent just enough time with the secondary characters to grow a bit fond of them — deliberately obnoxious Finnick, jarringly provocative Johanna, offbeat geeks Beedee and Wiress — but not quite enough to dissolve the mystery surrounding any of them or their true intentions (which become more and more enigmatic as the film progresses). We only need adhere to Katniss and Peeta once tossed in the pit of doom that is the 75th Hunger Games arena, but finding real characters in the other tributes makes for a far more fun round of extreme manhunt.
But Catching Fire doesn't vie for anything particularly grand. It entertains and engages, having fun with and anchoring weight to its characters and circumstances, but stays within the expected confines of what a Hunger Games movie can be. It's a good one, but without shooting for succinctly interesting or surprising work with Katniss and her relationships or taking a stab at anything but the obvious in terms of sending up the militant tyrannical autocracy, it never even closes in on the possibility of being a great one.
3.5/5
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In celebration of Superman's 75th anniversary, and the release June 14 of the Son of Krypton's latest big-screen adventure Man of Steel, writer Larry Tye, author of Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero, Now Out In Paperback, contributes this essay exclusively to Hollywood.com on the unique qualities some of the actors who've played Superman — Kirk Alyn, George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, and Henry Cavill — have brought to the role.
Nobody is more All-American than Superman in his red cape, blue tights and bright yellow "S." So how is it that a Brit – a native of the Channel Islands and a product of a Buckinghamshire boarding school, with an English brogue no less – is donning the leotards and cape in the new Man of Steel movie?
Warner Bros' selection of Henry William Dalgliesh Cavill as our newest Superman seems ill-conceived if not profane, the more so coming just as America is celebrating its hero's milestone 75th birthday. But Cavill, a British heartthrob who played the First Duke of Suffolk on the Showtime series The Tudors, wouldn't be the first on-screen Man of Steel to defy convention and, in so doing, to soar higher than even his studio handlers dared dream.
Kirk Alyn, the original live-action Superman, was more a song-and-dance man than an actor, having studied ballet and performed in vaudeville and on Broadway in the 1930s and early forties. That's where he decided to trade in the name he was born with, John Feggo, Jr., for Kirk Alyn, which he felt was better suited to the stage. He appeared in chorus lines and in blackface, modeled for muscle magazines, and performed in TV murder mysteries in the days when only bars had TVs and only dead-end actors performed for the small screen. But he had experience in movie serials, if not in superheroes, so when he got a call from Columbia Pictures in 1948 asking if he was interested in trying out for Superman he jumped into his car and headed to the studio. Told to take off his shirt so the assembled executives could check out his build, the burly performer complied. Then producer-director Sam Katzman instructed him to take off his pants. "I said, 'Wait a minute.' They said, 'We want to see if your legs are any good,'" he recalled forty years later. They were good enough, and fifteen minutes after he arrived, Alyn was hired as the first actor to play a Superman whom fans could see as well as hear.
Alyn and his directors were smart enough not to try and reinvent the character that Bud Collyer had introduced so convincingly to the radio airwaves. “I visualized the guy I heard on the radio. That was a guy nothing could stop,” Alyn said. "That's why I stood like this, with my chest out, and a look on my face saying, 'Shoot me.'" His demeanor said "tough guy" but his wide eyes signaled approachability and mischievousness, just the way creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had imagined their Superman a decade before. Alyn understood, the same way Collyer had, that kids could spot a phony in an instant. If they didn't think Alyn was having fun – and that he believed in Superman – they wouldn't pay to see his movies. His young audience, after all, didn't just admire the Man of Steel. They loved him. Superman was not merely who they dreamed of becoming but who they were already, if only we could see. The good news for them was that Alyn was having fun, and he did believe in his character in a way that these pre-teens and teens appreciated even if movie reviewers wouldn't.
In the 1950s, when Superman was gearing up for television, producer Robert Maxwell and director Tommy Carr screened nearly two hundred candidates who were sure they were him. Most made their living as actors, although some were full-time musclemen. Nearly all, Carr said, "appeared to have a serious deficiency in their chromosome count." So thorough – and perhaps so frustrating – was their search that the executives stopped by the Mr. America contest in Los Angeles. One choice they never seriously considered, despite his later claims, was Kirk Alyn, who had done well enough for the serials but had neither the acting skills nor the looks around which to build a Superman TV series. The search ended the day a barrel-chested B-movie actor named George Reeves showed up on the studio lot.
Maxwell's co-producer had recognized Reeves in a Los Angeles restaurant, seeming "rather forlorn," and suggested he come in for a tryout. He did, the next morning, and "from that moment on he was my first choice," said Carr. "He looked like Superman with that jaw of his. Kirk had the long neck and fine features, but although I like Kirk very much, he never looked the Superman Reeves did." His tough-guy demeanor was no put-on. Standing six-foot-two and carrying 195 pounds, Reeves had been a light-heavyweight boxing champ in college and could have gone further if he hadn't broken his nose seven times and his mother hadn't made him step out of the ring.
The Superman TV show, like other incarnations of his story, turned around the hero himself. Collyer, the first flesh-and-blood Man of Steel, had set the standard. He lowered and raised the timbre of his voice as he switched between Superman and Clark, making the changeover convincing. Maxwell's wife Jessica, the TV dialogue director, would follow Reeves around the set urging him to do the same – but he just couldn't master the switch. The result: a Superman who sounded just like his alter ego. They both swallowed their words. They looked and acted alike. There was no attempt here to make Clark Kent into the klutz he was in the comics. No slouching; no shyness. Reeves portrayed the newsman the way he knew, and that Jessica's husband told him to: hard-boiled and rough-edged, Superman in a business suit. The only differences were that Reeves would shed his rubber muscles and add thick tortoise-shell glasses with no lenses – that was the sum total of his switch to Clark Kent.
But it worked. It worked because fans wanted to be fooled, and because of the way Reeves turned to the camera and made it clear he knew they knew his secret, even if Lois, Jimmy, and Perry didn't. This Superman had a dignity and self-assurance that projected even better on an intimate TV screen than it had in the movies. Reeves just had it somehow. He called himself Honest George, The People's Friend – the same kind of homespun language Jerry and Joe used for their creation – and he suspended his own doubts the way he wanted viewers to. He looked not just like a guy who could make gangsters cringe, but who believed in the righteousness of his hero's cause. His smile could melt an iceberg. His cold stare and puffed-out chest could bring a mob to its knees. Sure, his acting was workmanlike, but it won him generations of fans. Today, when those now grown-up fans call to mind their carefree youth, they think of his TV Adventures of Superman, and when they envision Superman himself, it is George Reeves they see.
Christopher Reeve was an even less likely choice when producers set out to find the right Superman for their 1970s motion picture extravaganza. It wasn't just his honey brown hair and 180 pounds that did not come close to filling out his six-foot-four frame. He had asthma and he sweated so profusely that a crew member would have to blow dry his armpits between takes. He was prep school and Ivy League, with a background in serious theater that made him more comfortable in England's Old Vic than its Pinewood movie lot. He was picked, as he acknowledged, 90% because he looked "like the guy in the comic book . . . the other 10% is acting talent." He also was a brilliant choice. He brought to the part irony and comic timing that harked back to the best of screwball comedy. He had dramatic good looks and an instinct for melding humanism with heroism. "When he walked into a room you could see this wasn't a conventional leading man, there was so much depth he had almost an old movie star feeling," says casting director Lynn Stalmaster. The bean counters loved his price: $250,000, or less than a tenth of what Marlon Brando would get for the modest role as Superman's dad. Director Richard Donner asked Reeve to try on his horned-rimmed glasses. Squinting back at him was Clark Kent. Even his name fit: Christopher Reeve assuming the part made famous by George Reeves. "I didn't find him," Donner would say throughout the production. "God sent him to me."
Superman changed with every artist who filled in his features, writer who scripted his adventures, and even the marketers and accountants who managed his finances and grew his audience. Each could claim partial ownership. Actors like Christopher Reeve did more molding and framing than anyone and could have claimed more proprietorship. With each scene shot it was clearer that he was giving the hero a different face as well as a unique personality. Reeve's Superman would be funnier and more human – if less powerful or intimidating – than any who had proceeded him. He was more of a Big Blue Boy Scout now, in contrast to Kirk Alyn's Action Ace and George Reeves's Man of Steel. In the hands of this conservatory-trained actor, Supes was getting increasingly comfortable baring his soul.
Picking up the role and the mythos now will be English actor Henry Cavill, whose first appearance on the big screen was as Albert Mondego in The Count of Monte Cristo (2002). Can Cavill make us believe the way Reeve, Reeves, and Alyn did, and make us embrace a British-accented Man of Metropolis?
History suggests he can – provided he and Warner Bros. remember the formula that has served their hero so brilliantly for 75 years and counting. It starts with the intrinsic simplicity of his story. Little Orphan Annie and Oliver Twist reminded us how compelling a foundling's tale can be, and Superman, the sole survivor of a doomed planet, is a super-foundling. The love triangle connecting Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Superman has a side for everyone, whether you are the boy who can't get the girl, the girl pursued by the wrong boy, or the conflicted hero. His secret identity might have been annoying if we hadn't been let in on the joke and we didn't have a hero hidden within each of us. He was not just any hero, but one with the very powers we would have: the strength to lift boulders and planets, the speed to outrun a locomotive or a bullet, and, coolest on anyone's fantasy list, the gift of flight.
Superpowers, however, are just half the equation. More essential is knowing what to do with them, and nobody has a more instinctual sense than Superman of right and wrong. He is an archetype of mankind at its pinnacle. Like John Wayne, he sweeps in to solve our problems. No "thank you" needed. Like Jesus Christ, he descended from the heavens to help us discover our humanity. He is neither cynical like Batman nor fraught like Spider-Man. For the religious, he can reinforce whatever faith they profess; for nonbelievers he is a secular messiah. The more jaded the era, the more we have been suckered back to his clunky familiarity. So what if the upshot of his adventures is as predictable as with Sherlock Holmes: the good guy never loses. That is reassuring.
There is no getting around the fact that the comic book and its leading man could only have taken root in America. What could be more U.S.A. than an orphaned outsider who arrives in this land of immigrants, reinvents himself, and reminds us that we can reach for the sky? Yet this flying Uncle Sam also has always been global in his reach, having written himself into the national folklore from Beirut to Buenos Aires. If Cavill acknowledges both sides of that legacy, the all-American and the all-world, then he should be able to reel back aging devotees and draw in new ones.
Larry Tye was an award-winning journalist at The Boston Globe and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. A lifelong Superman fan, Tye now runs a Boston-based training program for medical journalists. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Satchel, as well as The Father of Spin, Home Lands, and Rising from the Rails, and co-author, with Kitty Dukakis, of Shock. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, and is currently writing a biography of Robert F. Kennedy.
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Actor Adam Scott is set to replace John Cusack in a sequel to comedy Hot Tub Time Machine. Cusack's co-stars in the zany original - Craig Robinson, Rob Corddry and Clark Duke - have signed up for the new film, which is scheduled for a 2014 release.

As expected, The Croods bashed the competition — with a blunt club, most likely — at the box office this weekend. The family-friendly animated film, which stars voicework by Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, and Cloris Leachman, raked in $44.7 million dollars, a bit over the expected $40 million.
Also surpassing Oz The Great and Powerful this weekend (which has held court at the top spot since it was released March 8) is FilmDistrict's Olympus Has Fallen. The action flick, which chronicles the abduction of the President of the United States and consequent takeover of the nation's capital and stars Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, and Aaron Eckhart, made $30.5 million at the box office this weekend. This breaks the trend of R-rated action movies foundering at the box office this year.
Despite The Croods and Olympus' strong opening numbers, however, the overall box office is down 34% from the same weekend in 2012. Considering it was this same weekend last year that The Hunger Games burst onto the scene, the drop isn't so surprising. During its opening weekend in 2012, The Hunger Games set a record with its incredible $152.5 million debut.
Who else scored at the box office this weekend? Here are the top five:
1. The Croods: $44,700,000
2. Olympus Has Fallen: $30,500,000
3. Oz the Great and Powerful: $22,031,000 with $177,559,000 to date
4. The Call: $8,700,000 with $30,904,000 to date
5. Admission: $6,445,650
[Photo Credit: DreamWorks Animation]

The Croods will entertain smaller children with its bright colors and funky animal creations, but anyone looking for more than that will be sorely disappointed. The plot is, shall we say, crudely simple: A family of cave-dwellers must abandon their way of life when the tectonic plates shift, causing a ripple effect of natural disasters that threaten not just their cave but their lives. The future beckons, and the Croods' guide is Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a slightly more evolved human who knows about things like fire, shoes, and belts — specifically, a sloth named Belt who holds his pants up and acts as adorable comic relief. Guy also serves as a romantic interest for our heroine Eep (Emma Stone) and the burr in Daddy Crood's backside, an old school Neanderthal type with a low-hanging brow and a fiercely overprotective nature.
The push/pull dynamic of the Croods' fear of the future and desire to learn more about Guy's world (and also not die) is a decent foil to the more personal tension between our heroine Eep and her dad Grug (Nicolas Cage). In this world, sneaking out at night could lead to certain death, and the family has only survived so far because Grug is strong and cautious. "Fear keeps us alive. Never not be afraid," he tells his family, just in case we didn't get the point.
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Eep is at that shaky time in a teen girl's life where she's still her daddy's baby but also longs for sunshine and adventure and love. Guy's the one who urges them towards a mystical place called Tomorrow, and eventually Grug's gotta decide if he wants to keep up with the times or stay behind. The majority of the movie consists of the Croods mock-fighting with each other and chasing or being chased by large animals, strung together by hollow emotional interactions between the characters. The story itself has promise, but its execution is lacking.
The strangest thing about The Croods is that its talented voice cast is so bland as to be unrecognizable. The charming Stone is lost behind her character's muddy identity, which switches between a present-day teen and a Neanderthal with overpowering strength and the ability to walk and run on her hands and feet. Keener's character Ugga, Eep's mom, is nearly invisible, and mostly serves as a body to transport the obnoxious toddler Sandy. Cloris Leachman voices Gran, a character that allows writers/directors Kirk De Micco and Chris Sanders (Space Chimps) to flex their Catskill-era comedy skills when it comes to jokes about mother-in-laws that are too mean or stubborn to die.
Thankfully, The Croods does offer viewers something to look at while the characters go on their interminable trip. Although the Croods and Guy themselves leave something to be desired in terms of design, the environments they travel through are inventive, wildly colorful, and fun. Granted, we're not talking about a ParaNorman-like attention to detail, but it's something to look at while you're biding your time. The animals they encounter are strangely cute, too, like the weird Corgi/alligator that Thunk Crood (Clark Duke) adopts and named Douglas. The 3D is fine and doesn't feel like too much of a rip-off, but it's not necessarily going to blow your mind. Still, there's something missing if the most interesting and memorable thing in your movie is a pink sloth that doubles as a belt. Hopefully, parents are ready to hear their little ones imitate Belt's "Dun dun DUNNNN!" and buy all the Belt-branded merchandise sure to follow.
2.5/5
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The Croods may be about a family discovering new worlds in their stone-age setting — places in which whales walk on land and tigers are rainbow-colored — but the voice of head caveman Grug, Nicolas Cage, is ready to move his family on to the final frontier: Space. When he sat down with Hollywood.com (video below), Cage told us all about how the cro-magnon crew could boldly go where no caveman has gone before.
RELATED: 'Croods' Star Emma Stone Teaches Ryan Reynolds About GIFs -VIDEO
"I want to see the Croods in space so that way we have all the Jetsons and the Flintstones all rolled into one," he says. But it's not just about circumstance, The Croods employs a wild sense of imagination, taking us and the caveman clan (comprised of characters voiced by Emma Stone, Cloris Leachman, Catherine Keener, and Clark Duke) into spectacular landscapes full of exotic vegetation and even more exotic animals, something that could be even more fantastical in space. "You could take it to the next level in terms of landscapes. You could Star Trek it, there could be an entire planet that is purple," says Cage.
But Cage's character Grug might not actually be up for that kind of adventure. His mode of operation is hiding from anything new or unknown, something his daughter Eep (Stone) rebels against rather vehemently when she meets a new friend, Guy (Ryan Reynolds). Cage says Grug's anti-exploration position couldn't be further from his style.
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"I don't relate to Grug, I really dont... I'd even cringe when I had lines like 'New is bad' and 'Never not be a afraid,'" he says. "I want to face the unknown, I want to go on road trips and go to wild places and explore," adds Cage with the caveat that as a father himself, he does understand the want to protect one's children.
And even with all of Grug's safety at all costs rhetoric, the film still makes sure to give even the youngest children the benefit of the doubt. "[The movie] doesn't talk down to kids, it knows how intelligent they are," says Cage.
The intelligent, creative, visually-stunning film and Cage's vocal stylings will hit movie screens March 22.
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Appeared opposite John Cusack and Rob Corddry in "Hot Tub Time Machine"

Cast as a college student in the ABC Family series "Greek"

Landed a cameo role in "Superbad"

Summary

Clark Duke was only 7 when he landed his first acting gig as on "Hearts Afire" (CBS, 1992-95), but he avoided the dreaded child actor syndrome by staying out of the business until he was a young adult, studying filmmaking at Loyola Marymount University. With the help of his best friend, "Arrested Development" actor Michael Cera, Duke wrote, directed and starred in the 2007 series "Clark and Michael." CBS's decision to distribute the meta-mockumentary show online coincided with the aspiring writer's return to acting; first in several small TV roles, and then with a small but memorable cameo in Cera's breakout hit "Superbad" (2007). The next few years saw the Baptist-raised actor land a lead role on the collegiate ensemble series "Greek" (ABC, 2007-2011); appear in the road-trip romance "Sex Drive" (2008); and star in the viral video "Drunk History, Vol. 2" (2008) opposite Jack Black. Duke next landed the one-two punch of starring in the high profile films "Kick-Ass" (2010) and "Hot Tub Time Machine" (2010), which led to his being cast as an ambitious sales rep on the long-running comedy "The Office" (NBC, 2005- ) and Eddie Murphy's harried assistant in "A Thousand Words" (2012). He may be the voice of a teenage caveman in "The Croods" (2013), but Clark Duke built his career as an actor on smart choices.

Name

Role

Comments

Ronnie Duke

Father

Angela Duke

Mother

Education

Name

Loyola Marymount University

Notes

Best friends with actor Michael Cera, whom he met when they lived next-door to each other in an apartment complex in California.

"Writing and directing is pretty much all I want to do. I don't care if I'm in them or not, but my long term goal is to make that transition to writing." -- from NeonTommy.com, Mar. 6, 2012

Co-created the pilot episode of the web series "Clark and Michael" with Cera as his final thesis project.

Is a comic book collector and has attended several ComicCons and WonderCons.